How the hell do you adapt anything by Philip K. Dick? For the screenwriters of the Dick-derived Blade Runner, Paycheck, Screamers and Total Recall, making mainstream hash of the late author/addict/self-described-shizophrenic's wondrously inventive weird tales was to scavenge them for the high concepts that came to the insanely prodigious author like the natural side effect of breathing. Conspicuously absent in the lot was the dark center that held his lunatic inventions together and—as the kids used to say—matter.
Writer/director Richard Linklater's superbly entertaining/disturbing adaptation of Dick's A Scanner Darkly accomplishes the near-impossible—respecting the crazy-diamond architect, keeping most of his labyrinthine plotting, warring philosophies and even swathes of priceless dialogue. It even makes sense. Well, mostly.
Then again, designed mind-screwage was an essential part of Dick's unflattering view of a government/media/culture that had so embraced cognitive dissonance as SOP that the only sane reaction was to dope up on drugs such as his fictional "Substance D"—created, of course, by a subsidiary of the U.S. government.
Paranoid? Sure. But also recall that Dick reached his artistic peak in the '70s while living in California's ultraconservative, anomie-ridden Orange County. Kids were dying in a pointless deception-based war; the president was trying to expand his power limitlessly while covertly compiling a secret "enemies list." The only difference between then and now, Linklater's film argues with surprising lightness, and with one technological fancy aside, is that Scanner can no longer honestly pass itself off as science fiction.
Like his less successful Waking Life, Linklater's film is a rotoscoped affair. That is, it was shot with live actors and Keanu Reeves, and their performances were literally drawn over and visually enhanced in post production to create an unsettlingly real, yet queasily disorienting brand of animation.
Reeves plays Bob Arctor, family man and frazzled foot soldier in the government's endless war on "drug terrorism." Arctor works while wearing an identity-blurring "scramble suit" which causes him to look like an endlessly shifting procession of other people.
His assignment: Spy on a possible dope/terrorism ring comprised of motormouth lunatic Barris (a career-peaking Robert Downey Jr.), dim hippie Luckman (Woody Harrelson), bug-hallucination-prone Freck (Rory Cochrane) and the in-every-way-ambiguous Donna (Winona Ryder).
But after some hilarious Substance D-generated paranoia sketches about duplicitous bicycles and homicidal midsize sedans, it turns out that not only is Arctor a "D-head," he's also essentially narcing on himself: A drug-induced brain split has divided his gray matter into warring hemispheres hell-bent on obliterating the other's reality. Then things get really weird.
While the finale Linklater crafts is sometimes a bit muddled, its final sounds (many by Radiohead) and images ultimately create a post-acid-high pastoral melancholy that's singular and hard to shake. More importantly, his devotion to the disappointed humanist heart of Dick's work is unfettered by the glib hipness that soured Before Sunset or the weary professionalism of bill-paying screen-stuffers like School of Rock.
A multi-valanced-nutzoid scene wherein a would-be suicide—armed with downers, wine and a copy of The Fountainhead—encounters a punishing alien God-thing displays not only Linklater's skill with such seemingly lunatic material, but his respectful trust in a mainstream audience's willingness to discover the raw stuff encoded in pulp SF metaphors. Again, the director sometimes piles on too much multireality agita, but when he scores, he scores big.
As Donna surveys the wreck of what used to be Arctor, a corporate-type companion sneers, "What a loser." To which she replies venomously, "Anyone can be a winner."
At first the line seems like another articulation of Linklater's tendency towards cool-cat glibness. But as Donna repeats it with increasing venom, and in light of the sadly gorgeous images of fragmented identity that follow, Linklater channels Dick's primary assertion: That being a "winner" in the American argot is a synonym for someone willing to sacrifice their essential humanity to the shifting whims of some ultimately unknowable authority. Understandably, the only option is to get wasted. You can see why Hollywood has left this bit out of its other Dick iterations—and why its inclusion here makes A Scanner Darkly so essential.
A SCANNER DARKLY (4 stars)
Director: Richard Linklater.
Stars: Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson.
Rated: R. Opens Friday.